The Beginning of Color

These brown discolorations on a faded black-

and-white photograph are not at all like a defect

In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of

“Crystallization” as Stendhal described it, in

One of his more eccentric books about love.

In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig

Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg

From where it emerged, of this I’m certain,

As something much richer than my own life,

A jeweled branch of living history, now

Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig

Bog Lane. I’ll never know who it was, and anyway

Why would I want to know who it was,

Who slid the black hard plastic button to On

One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven,

So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open

In my head, but the full force of color saturation

Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome

And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems — 

It’s just that as my mother hauled the metallic

Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well

In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected

Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew

How biography is the steadying of only one kind

Of lens, how memory offers different iterations;

How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with

Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form

Over time. During that summer, a world away,

The first International Color Salon was organized

In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar

Imports meant that Ireland couldn’t reach a speed

Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There

Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography

Was ready for color, our brains were marked

That year for realities more personal, realities brighter

Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats

That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in

Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and

Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles

Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.